Ed Sheeran Adds North America to His Sights

Ed Sheeran says he's sent a couple songs to his friends in One Direction. He doesn't have time to write with them at the moment, though. The English singer-songwriter has a North American tour to worry about first...

Photograph by: Warner Music
, Warner Music

Ed Sheeran had been in North America for a few weeks, opening for Irish pop-rock act Snow Patrol, before he found himself in Toronto. “It’s a really chilled out tour,” says Sheeran, eyes bulging behind the thick lenses of his glasses, as he sits in a downtown pub describing his current lifestyle of performing, writing the occasional song and discovering America’s Mexican restaurants.

It’s fish and chips for the 21-year-old singer-songwriter today, though, not Mexican food at all. “I know, it’s weird,” he says. “We’re in a British pub, and I do have to say, in Britain, when you get pub fish and chips, it’s about this big,” his hands miming a foot-long meal that dwarfs the puck of batter on his plate.

“It’s cool, we’ll forget about that,” he says, his big-fried-fish story complete.

Yes, let’s. And with luck, Sheeran’s North American experience, on the whole, won’t be as disappointing as the pub fare -- because things really are different here for the musician, never mind the haddock.

Here, Sheeran’s major label debut, + (pronounced “Plus”), hasn’t even arrived yet. (It’s due in Canada June 12.) Looking like a kid off the street in cargo shorts and a t-shirt, he can finish his lunch uninterrupted, save for occasional visits from his publicist (his afternoon is packed with interviews). “It’s still quite a fairly underground thing,” Sheeran says of how his music has been received in North America so far. “It hasn’t hit the mainstream yet, which is really nice.”

In the UK, Sheeran finished 2011 with the biggest selling single of the year. The song is “The A Team,” the breeziest ballad you’ll ever hear about a teenage drug addict. The album it appears on, the aforementioned +, arrived in the UK in September, and according to Forbes, it’s sold more than 1 million copies overseas. And while another English singer-songwriter, Adele, ruled North American pop this last year, at the BRIT Awards, Sheeran bested the “Someone Like You” singer in overall nominations. (He went on to collect two trophies, for British Breakthrough Act and British Solo Artist, in late February.)

Critically, Sheeran’s fared differently -- something he brings up himself in conversation. (The Metacritic score for + is a modest 65 out of 100, for instance.) A performer with the aw-shucks attitude his average-bloke styling suggests, Sheeran trades in gentle, acoustic pop -- writing songs about “love and life and death,” as he’s previously put it. He’s not the only one, of course. An October 2011 Guardian column added him to a movement they dubbed the “The New Boring” -- “a ballad-friendly tedial wave” of sales sensations like Adele and Mumford & Sons who’ve been the mumsy antidote to the Gagas and LMFAOs of the world.

“My album wasn’t very critically acclaimed at all, in any sense,” says Sheeran. “I got a bit sensitive about it, like ‘Why don’t people think my music’s good? It’s selling a lot. Does this mean it’s just selling, but I’m not good?’”

This afternoon, though, he’s feeling less prickly about the criticism. Sheeran’s “The A Team” was nominated for an Ivor Novello award hours earlier, up against Adele (“Someone Like You”) and Florence + The Machine (“Shake it Out”) in the category of Best Song Musically and Lyrically. The honour is decided by The British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, without consideration of sales. “It’s the biggest pat on the back I could expect,” says Sheeran. “It gives me strength to believe that people may be wrong.”

It’s interesting that Sheeran cops to a few insecurities, if you consider how assured he is about his live show. (As Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody, for instance, told Fuse earlier this month: "He's 21 years old and has all the confidence of someone who's been doing it for years and years.") In 2009, Sheeran -- who’s been gigging in London since he was 16 -- played 312 shows. Good luck finding a story that doesn’t mention that bit of trivia. (“That’s only because it’s one of the top things on Wikipedia,” he laughs.)

“My thing with the 300 gigs in a year was ‘I’m going to make myself the best live performer that I can be,” says Sheeran. “It’s just practice makes perfect,” he continues. “It’s like, if I were to play the Grammy Awards tomorrow, I’d still be scared, but I’d still have a certain level of confidence.”

And though his U.S. trek continues for a few weeks -- and will keep him from the Ivor Novello ceremony May 17 -- Sheeran won’t be repeating his 2009 touring schedule in North America. Sheeran ponders the challenge of breaking Stateside: “I have no expectations other than the fact there are so many people in this country, only naught point five per cent of them might like my music, so I’ve got to find that naught point five per cent and that -- that’s my thing.”

He could always work the One Direction angle. The English/Irish boyband has become a phenomenon. (In March, their debut, Up All Night, debuted at No. 1 in both U.S. and Canada.) Sheeran wrote a song, “Moments,” that appears on special editions of that hit record. Better than that, he’s pals with the group. (1D’s Harry Styles appears in Sheeran’s video for “Drunk,” for instance, and the British tabloids even run items about how he and Styles stay up all night together -- playing with Lego.)

“They’re hard core, man, those guys. They’re cool,” says Sheeran of One Direction. “I know Harry and Louis [Tomlinson] really well.” (He met the group through a member of their backing band; Sheeran used to crash on the guy’s couch.) In February, One Direction told Dose.ca that they’d like to work with Sheeran on the follow-up to Up All Night, and Sheeran says he’s definitely game for a collaboration.

“They have so much power to do whatever,” says Sheeran, “I mean, they could release a hard-core metal album and people would love them, yeah? I’d like to go away and really write some wicked songs [with them].” Unfortunately, he adds: “I don’t think either of us have time to actually get down in a studio, because they’re doing their tour and I’m doing mine.” That said, he has been in touch.

“I’ve got two songs that their manager e-mailed me for -- old songs that were meant to go on my last album -- a big stadium anthem. So I’m going to put them towards them and see if they like them,” says Sheeran, who adds, “I wouldn’t necessarily do that with any other bands.”

And not many other bands could give Sheeran a surge of young followers in North America -- an effect he’s already noticed. “It’s weird, in England, I see everything -- and you have the young people, the old people, the middle aged people. Over here, it’s very much a young fanbase, and I think some of it has to do with the song I wrote on [One Direction’s] album.”

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Ed Sheeran says he's sent a couple songs to his friends in One Direction. He doesn't have time to write with them at the moment, though. The English singer-songwriter has a North American tour to worry about first...

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